MY FINAL HALLOWEEN POST!

Holy Cow! It's almost Halloween! This'll probably be my last post for that holiday, so I'll try to make it interesting.



Here (above) Lon Chaney enters the Opera Ball as the Red Death.




Here's (above) some plague victims unearthed in Italy.



I always thought the costumes plague doctors wore (above) would make good Halloween costumes.



Speaking of the Plague, what do you think of this giant rat attempting to eat the passengers in this car?



The Stepford Puppets (above)!



What the heck is the "Jeckle & Hyde Club?"



The Yale Skull and Bones Society. Not even most people who go to Yale know what goes on in there!



The funeral of Siegfried (above).



A strange drawing I got off the net (above) showing jagged peaks on the Moon. Its not a great sketch but I kinda like it, because it assumes weird and menacing shapes are present on another world, and every day are defiantly but impotently threatening the Earth.




I wish I'd been able to find a good picture of a haunted house ride. This one's so infuriatingly happy!



Let's shake off all that happiness and check out this item from The Amsterdam Museum of Torture. It's a head vice. Good Lord!



The famous Iron Maiden of Nuremberg (above)!



Someone went to a lot of trouble to build this chair of spikes.



Here's (above) a less elaborate version of the same thing. It's still plenty scary when you consider what the weights on the floor must have been used for.



A bust (above) of Rondo Hatten.




Don't you love the masks (above) kids make?



Only the previous day the homeowner of this yard was seen mowing his lawn. Now all that remains of him is one shoe and the abandoned mower. Strange icons have appeared.



An interesting rubber mask (above)! Great color!




If you're planning to be a mad scientist, you'll need a study (above) as well as a lab. How about something like this? Is this set from "Metropolis"?



I like costumes that elongate the character (above).



Some trolls (above) from Steve Worth's ASIFA blog on Bauer.



A New Orleans-inspired voodoo mask.



Ah, gargoyles! I don't know why they appear on cathedrals but I'm glad they do.




Some modern-day churches (above)make use of gargoyles too! It's a tradition!




Well, that wraps it up! Have a good Halloween everybody!!!!!



BTW, some of the pictures used here were stolen from Karswell's superb horror blog:

http://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com

...and from Fournier's wonderful Frankenstein blog:

http://frankensteinia.blogspot.com

HIGH SCHOOL SWEETHEARTS

UNCLE EDDIE: "Amanda!!!! It's so good to see you again!



UNCLE EDDIE: "Waiter! Get this girl anything she wants! It's on me!"

"Amanda, you should try the lobster, it's really good here! And for wine, try the Cuvee Royale. It's pricey, but it's worth it!"



AMANDA: "It's good to see you too, Eddie. It's been a long time."




UNCLE EDDIE: "Yeah, we were high school sweethearts, remember? Amanda and Eddie; Eddie and Amanda! We were inseperable."



AMANDA: "Those were the days alright! I remember you used to draw a lot."



UNCLE EDDIE: "Yeah, I became a cartoonist! I moved to LA, and got into the animation industry...I have a family now, and two kids...life's been good! How about you!?



AMANDA: "Oh, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I think about you a lot."




UNCLE EDDIE: "Me!? You think about ME!!? Awww, that's sweet."




AMANDA: "Yeah, I think about you all the time. That's why I wanted to have lunch with you. There's something I've always wanted to show you...something...awfully... private..."




UNCLE EDDIE: "(Gulp!) Show me? Private????"



AMANDA: "Yeah, it's the gap on my record shelf where my Phil Collins records used to be! Rmemember I lent them to you? What did you do with them? I could get a good price for them now."



UNCLE EDDIE: "Phil Collins?



UNCLE EDDIE: "...Um, you said Phil collins, right?"



UNCLE EDDIE: "Well, um...let's see now...you moved away and...OK, now I remember! Yeah, I had those records on the shelf for years."



UNCLE EDDIE: "Finally I just gave them away. I mean they were Phil Collins records, for Pete's sake! Even the Salvation Army wouldn't take them! The guy kicked me out of the store."



AMANDA: "You gave them away? That's men for you! Not an ounce of consideration."



UNCLE EDDIE: "But...but... they were Phil Collins records..."



AMANDA: "Men are such beasts."



UNCLE EDDIE: "Don't worry! I'll look for them on eBay! You'll get them back, I promise! Look, it's getting late. I'm really sorry, but I gotta go."




UNCLE EDDIE: "Waiter! Get this girl anything she wants!!! It's on me!

(Eddie To Amanda) "You gotta try the grilled cheese sandwich here! And don't miss the tap water! It's to die for! Well, I gotta go now!"

TOO SLEEPY TO WRITE! I'LL BE BACK MID-DAY TUESDAY!!

**************

THE INDIAN SUPERMAN

Am I the only one who hadn't seen this film yet? I never heard of it til yesterday! Anway, here's a song from an Indian film which shows Superman and Spiderman teamed up to fight crime with disco dancing.




But wait! Some of those moves are ripped from Napoleon Dynamite, right!?

SOME CREEPY HALLOWEEN PICTURES

When I was a kid I would have thought this guy (above) had one of the best jobs in the world: professional mask-maker...every kid's dream! I wonder why there's no such a thing as a kids' store where comic books, toys, masks, fake guns and swords, science stuff, chemistry sets, exotic sodas, fake mounted dinosaur heads, magic tricks, fireworks, etc. are sold all year round.






TV weather stations should emphasize bad weather and ominous natural events around Halloween time. The unspoken, subliminal message should be that a menacing witch's spell is settling on the Earth.



There's lots of kinds of masks. Why don't we see fake African witch doctors and Balinese demons (above) on Halloween night?



I love home-made masks, even when they're made with paper plates like these (above) are.




Ghoulish descriptions of hell are great but is there a Biblical passage that justifies them? Maybe all that came from the imagination of people like Dante. If even fallen angels are so intellectual how come they find pleasure in biting people's faces? Maybe Dante unintentionally did us a disservice. I imagine that after reading him, the medieval torturers perceived their mission as kind and caring. After all, if Hell was as bad as this (above) then racking or burning someone to save his soul would be positively merciful.



A colorful Nolde painting (above).




The evil is so intense here (above) that the air is saturated with howling demons and the people walk funny, as if they were half dead marionettes.



This Hindu mask (above) is terrific!




At first glance this collage (above) seems kind of amateurish and badly executed, but the more you look at it, the more convincing and creepy it gets. Nothing in the picture looks the way it should. You imagine that the witch moves in a jerky, pixilated, unnatural fashion. The very air around her warps as she moves through it, as if a field of something antagonistic to nature surrounds her. If this were on film I picture it done in the style of the film-within-a-film in the American horror film, "The Ring."




Talking about unnatural, I like the graphic way that people were depicted in the old, silent horror films (above). It's easier to be scary when you're not tied down to a naturalistic look.




Here's (above) one of the Japanese masks a commenter recently linked to.










Painting with light! I love it!




Nice poster!



Here (above) the ghost of a long-dead hunter is caught, prowling the forest. Some primitive cultures attach a lot of significance to unexplainable motions perceived for an instant out of the side of one's eye. Often they're regarded as forest spirits which can't be viewed straight on.


Thanks to Pierre and Karswell for most of the pictures!